(Note that six poems from this book appear in this issue of Innisfree.)

The first poem ("The Mandolin") in Rick Bursky's
comic, tender, elegiac, and surreal second collection, Death Obscura,
begins "This was the night the police chased the musicians from the roof .
. . ."

And we're off on a romp through Bursky's fecund imagination,
as if swept away with the Beatles from their 1969 rooftop concert. The
association seems more than apt, as Bursky's poems provoke and delight even as
they engage in the serious business of inquiring into love, death, traitors,
numbers, memory, and whatever else is on his mind or in his heart.

The poem continues with "This was the night someone hid
a mandolin in a garbage can . . . ," just as in these pages, Bursky has
secreted poems that sing in lines syntactically whole, but afire with
disorienting surprise and humor, as in "Cardiology":

A surgeon sold hearts he carved
from oak.

Some people have nothing to lose,

he said, sanding a pulmonary vein.

Bursky tells small stories that assume large dimensions in
the course of which he tosses off the poignant, "The original purpose of
the box / was to contain the emptiness"; kicks off the improbable, "I
named seven stars after her left eye. / Astronomers protested. / Dictators were
jealous. / Two religious leaders were outraged"; and makes the mordant
beautiful: "In the early morning, windows wide / to the luscious
odor of winter's corpse . . . ."

His spare free verse is corralled in service of these
stories. His narrator gives the impression of a chameleon channeling his
ventriloquist. There's a wry intimacy to the voice most noticeable when
the subject is love or the hope of love. "The Chrysalis" begins
with a woman's question: "'If you were me, would you love
you?'" He feels her question "in my chest." He tries
to kiss her. Then,

The next day at work, concentrating

on my responsibilities, the
accuracy

of foot-long wooden rulers, became
difficult.

Ba-dum.

Bursky tells stories that hover around the edges of the
plausible then in one turn run off the rails into wildly imaginative territory,
and that's where these poems dwell, in the mind of the storyteller where the
reader finds much tentative and longing reckoning at work. These poems
arise from a past Bursky freely confabulates yet uncannily defines: